Dragon Ball Z Eyes Mexico

Fox's long-awaited live-action Dragon Ball Z movie will reportedly film in Mexico rather than Montreal, as earlier reports suggested. The Durango region was said to have been selected by the film's special effects director, Ariel Shaw.

ComingSoon.net points out an article in the El Norte newspaper, which reports that the filmmakers plan to use the Mexiquillo Forest, Marley Ranch, Hacienda la Providencia, La Joya Ranch, Laguna Seca de Santiaguillo and a forum from a Convention Center in the Culture Institute as locations.

Additional shooting will take place in Estado De Mexico at the volcano Nevado de Toluca. Set construction reportedly begins this month, with filming to take place from January through March. Sources close to the studio confirm that production should be starting soon.

Read More

Microsoft Offers IE7 to all, Pirates Included

Microsoft has removed the the Windows Genuine Advantage validation requirement for installing Internet Explorer 7.Users running pirated or counterfeit copies of Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 can now download Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft announced Thursday.

From the moment it released IE7 almost a year ago, Microsoft has restricted the browser to users who can prove they own a legitimate copy of the operating system. Before Microsoft allows the browser to download, it runs the user's PC through a Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) validation test, a prime part of XP's antipiracy software.

When it instituted the requirement in 2006, Microsoft said rights to IE7 was one of the rewards for being legal. It changed its mind Thursday, saying the move is in users' best interest.

"Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, we're updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users," said Steve Reynolds, an IE program manager in a posting to a Microsoft company blog. "With today's 'Installation and Availability Update,' Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users."

Microsoft has consistently touted IE7 as a more secure browser, and post-launch patch counts back that up. In the past 11 months, IE6 for Windows XP SP2 has been patched for 22 vulnerabilities, 20 of them rated critical. IE7 for XP SP2, however, has been patched only 13 times; 10 of those fixes were ranked critical. In fact, when Microsoft announced that IE7 would not be offered to users running illegal copies of XP, some analysts questioned the company's commitment to security.

Read More

Google Offers $20 Million X Prize to Put Robot on Moon

Maybe it was the edible wafer-paper-and-soy-ink menus or the "sustainable" blue-cheese mousse whipped up by Google's chefs. Maybe it was the full-size replica of the indie commercial spacecraft SpaceShipOne suspended overhead. Or Robin Williams' jokes. Whatever the reason, the hundreds of Silicon Valley grandees who packed the Googleplex one Saturday evening last March were in an expansive mood. They had dropped $1,250 or more a head to benefit the X Prize Foundation, the nonprofit dedicated to spurring innovation through public competitions that promise big payouts to the winners. Supersize possibilities hung in the air.

A morning brainstorm featuring Google's Larry Page and Virgin's Richard Branson had already turned up scores of possible new X Prize targets, from early cancer detection to ultracheap solar energy. During a break for lunch, Page dropped one more on X Prize chief Peter Diamandis: He and Google cofounder Sergey Brin had been "kicking around" the idea of sending low-cost robotic landers to the moon.

Diamandis, who has been launching extraterrestrial enterprises since he was an MIT undergrad in the 1980s, grabbed his laptop and disappeared, returning half an hour later with a freshly minted PowerPoint deck. Page looked it over, then said, "Talk to Sergey." That evening, as the guests sipped cocktails in the shadow of the little white spaceplane, Diamandis cornered the Google technology chief and pitched. Brin loved it. "Some endeavors are too speculative, even for venture capital," he says. "If they're really worth doing, you try to find some other way."

Thus was born the Google Lunar X Prize, the latest and, well, farthest-out of the foundation's efforts to bolt competitive afterburners onto some of mankind's signature quests. Three years ago, SpaceShipOne won the first X Prize — officially the Ansari X Prize, named for the family of software entrepreneurs that underwrote it. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and serial aeronaut Burt Rutan collected $10 million for building the world's first privately funded reusable manned spacecraft. Since then, Diamandis has announced competitions for ultra-rapid gene sequencing and hyper fuel efficient vehicles. This latest challenge: Put a robotic lander on the moon, take a spin across the lunar landscape, and beam back visuals — with minimal or no government assistance. Pull that off before anyone else and the galaxy's richest, most audacious Internet company will hand over $20 million. You can win up to $5 million more for extras like traversing greater distances, visiting historic landing sites, and surviving the lunar night. There's a $5 million consolation prize if you come in second or land safely but fail to complete the rest of the mission. (No prize for guessing the name of the competition's official Web video service.)

The challenge goes beyond merely reaching the lunar surface. Pound for pound, putting anything on the moon — let alone sending back panoramic photos and YouTube clips — makes even manned suborbital flight look like a walk on the Mojave runway. Winning will require the biz-dev skills to muster funding and the technical savvy to manage squirrelly orbital mechanics, remote-control robotics, and bring-your-own bandwidth. Sure, the Russians made the first soft lunar landing more than 40 years ago, using Cold War era hardware. And yes, today you can fire up an iPhone and check the view from NASA's rovers on the Red Planet, another 90 million or so miles farther out in the cosmos. What you can't do — at least for now — is go off-planet without the kind of boondoggle budget that only governments can cough up. "How cool would it be," Diamandis says, "to do what NASA does at a tenth the cost? Or a hundredth? The technologies are there. What we need is a competitive model that can make it happen."

In fact, X Prize-style competitions tend to be less about the technological bleeding edge than busting down cost barriers. Charles Lindbergh's famous Spirit of St. Louis, the gold standard for prize-driven innovation, was adapted from a stock production plane, after all. The Ansari X Prize required a tremendous feat of aeronautics, but its real accomplishment was making it cheaper to get into space — and thus opening a flight path to space tourism. The Google Lunar X Prize aims to do the same for Earth's nearest neighbor, transforming what has been a combination celestial junkyard and stone-dead nature preserve into a viable human frontier. "Today, Earth's economic sphere extends out to geosynchronous orbit — 22,000 miles," Diamandis says. "We want to increase that by an order of magnitude."

Two dozen registered teams took a crack at the original X Prize, though few of them made it off the ground. Will the higher stakes of the lunar challenge pull a bigger, wealthier crowd? One likely participant, Paul Allen, won't comment. Neither will Idealab chair Bill Gross, whose bubble-era startup, Blastoff, had a strikingly similar lunar mission — and a CEO named Peter Diamandis. Google, in particular, hopes to see a global pool of challengers; China, India, Japan, Russia, and plenty of European countries boast the requisite technical skills, pride, and billionaires. (An international judging committee will watch for under-the-table government aid.) Launch costs alone could burn up tens of millions of dollars, so the foundation is hoping to lure high-profile corporate sponsors.

Of course, it took almost a decade to award the Ansari X Prize; the winner emerged only after a midcourse adjustment dropped the altitude requirement from 100 miles to 100 kilometers. ("Thank god we did," Diamandis says. "Or we'd still be waiting.") Aiming to bring the lunar showdown to a conclusion by 2012, Diamandis and company spent last summer debating how high to set the bar. "It's audacity versus achievability," says Will Pomerantz, the foundation's space prize director. "Too hard, and you won't have a winner. Too easy, and you don't drive breakthroughs." Then there's the question of affordability: The $20 million grand prize probably won't cover the cost of getting something up there, and losers will likely spend at least that amount with no return on investment.

Which raises the question: What's in it for Google? Lunar data centers? Google Maps Street View for Tranquility Base? For the record, Mountain View's corporate feet are planted squarely on terra firma. "Companies today spend more on stadiums and sailboat races than we will spend on this," says Brin, who was barely out of diapers back in Moscow when the last — Soviet, as it happens — moon lander, itself a robot craft, sent a scoop of soil back to Earth three decades ago. "Expanding science and technology is a far better way to reflect Google's values," he says. Plus there's the possibility of putting a Google logo on the moon.

Read More

United 300

Movie2007 MTV MOVIE AWARD Winner! First ever Best Spoof award, handed out by Samuel L. Jackson himself - Watch as 300 Spartans stand their ground against German Hijackerrs

Read More

Use the USB port to charge AA batteries

Moixa Energy has developed rechargeable AA batteries with a twist: the batteries are recharged simply by plugging them into an USB port.

The batteries, called USBCell, do not look different than a regular Ni-MH AA battery at first sight. However, the top part of the device is a cover that not only contains the cathode of the battery, but also, when opened, exposes the USB connector. The battery can be plugged into any USB host to be recharged.

At this time, there are only AA types of the technology available, but the manufacturer promises to follow up with 9V blocks and cellphone batteries in the near future.

The convenience of the recharging process (assumed you have a USB host, such as a notebook) put aside, there are a few downsides. The integration of the USB connector requires a reduction of the electrolyte. As a result, the available capacity is much lower than a typical Ni-MH battery, which are commonly selling in variants ranging from 1400 mah to about 2400 mah. The 1.2 volt AA USBCell provides a maximum of only 1300 mah, which means that it won’t be able to provide as much juice than regular rechargeable AA batteries.

The weight reduction that results from trading electrolyte for a USB connector is marginal: The USBCell weighs about 22 grams compared to the 23 grams of a regular AA battery.

Also, the charging time appears to be quite long, as the manufacturer noted on his webpage that a 90% charge is reached after a charging time of about 320 minutes.

A 2-pack of USBCell batteries is currently selling for just under $17.

Read More

HD-DVD group claims success against Blu-ray in Q2

HD DVD is outpacing Blu-ray in hardware sales growth, the North American HD DVD Promotional Group said today.

Referring to sales estimates from NPD and Nielsen Netratings, the HDVD group said that overall HD DVD hardware sales were up 37% from Q1 to Q2 2007, while software sales experienced a 20% increase in growth. During the same time-frame, overall Blu-ray hardware sales saw a 27% decline from Q1 to Q2, and Blu-ray software sales were down 5%.

According to a spokesperson, these numbers include both HD DVD players sold for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 game consoles; The HD DVD group declined to comment on absolute Q2 sales results, but given the exposure of the Playstation 3, Blu-ray is generally estimated to outpace HD DVD hardware sales in absolute numbers.

NPD did not return our calls in time for the publication of this article, but we will provide an update as soon as we receive detailed sales estimates for HD DVD and Blu-ray from the market research firm.

The HD DVD group’s success claims especially refer to the CE player segment. The recently announced price drop from $499 to $299 for the entry-level player segment has resulted in a sequential sales growth of 183% from Q1 to Q2, the organization said. The HD DVD group said that more than 180,000 CE players have been sold so far.

It appears to be price that will become more and more the focus of HD DVD promoters to push the format: “With the total number of titles available for each format differing by only 20-30 titles at this time, the real-world gap in content between the two formats is in actuality not as large as many would perceive," said Paul Erickson, market analyst with IMS Research in the HD DVD press release. “Consumers in the US and Europe continue to show the greatest sensitivity to price, rather than content or branding, in their purchase decision for standalone high-definition players."

Read More

Oldest DNA shows earth warmer than previously believed

A team of international researchers used oldest DNA to show that Greenland was much warmer at some point during the last Ice Age than most people have believed.

The DNA samples were collected by the scientists from the bottom of a two kilometer thick ice sheet and from the trees, plants and insects of a boreal forest estimated to be between 450,000 and 900,000 years-old.

Previously, the youngest evidence of a boreal forest in Greenland was from 2.4 million years ago.

The DNA samples suggest the temperature of the southern Greenland boreal forests 450,000 to 900,000 years ago was probably between 10 degrees Celsius in summer and -17 degrees Celsius in winter.

Also, the reduced glacier cover in that region means the global ocean was probably between 1 and 2 meters higher during that time compared to current levels.

"These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken, and what we've learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought," said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta and a co-author of the paper.

Sharp said the silty ice found underneath the huge Greenland glacier created a perfect, natural "freezer" to preserve the prehistoric DNA. Scientists have, in the past, found older organic matter, but they have not found any uncontaminated DNA that is as old or older than the Greenland samples.

Sharp and his PhD student Joel Barker contributed to the research by providing DNA samples from the silty ice of much younger glaciers (3,000 years old) on Ellesmere Island in Arctic Canada. The Canadian DNA samples offered a control sample for the researchers around the world who worked to estimate the age of the Greenland DNA samples.

Sharp, who has been a supporter of the idea that the current global warming trend is human induced, believes the new research offers evidence that climate warming on the current scale is possible through natural conditions.

However, he cautions that this research does not prove the current global warming trend is not human induced.

"It could mean that our current warming is the result of both natural processes and human influences, and we may be heading for even bigger temperature increases than we previously thought," Sharp said.

The results of the research were published in the latest issue of the Science Journal.

Read More

Ubisoft apologises for Rainbow Six pricing cock-up

Ubisoft has apologised that Xbox 360 gamers were initially charged for the recently released Black Edition map pack for Rainbow Six: Vegas when it was "was originally intended to be free".

Black Edition was released to Xbox Live Marketplace toward the end of June and, featuring five multiplayer maps, the pack was priced at 800 Microsoft Points (£6.80).

It was quickly removed, however, Major Nelson subsequently letting it be known that the map pack should have been a freebie and that those who had paid for it would be reimbursed. Black Edition then returned to XBL, free as originally intended.

In a statement about the cock-up, Ubisoft said, "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas Black Pack Downloadable Content for Xbox 360 Live was originally intended to be free content for the fans of Rainbow Six Vegas. We apologize for the error. All players who purchased the Black Pack will be reimbursed automatically within 8 to 10 weeks."

The publisher added that "as a token of our appreciation for the Rainbow Six community" it's making the previously released Player's Pack Red Edition available for free as of this coming Friday.

Player's Pack Red Edition debuted this April for 800 Microsoft Points and contains three brand new multiplayer maps, two 'relit' multiplayer maps and two new multiplayer game modes.

Read More